


Entangled

by chantefable



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: 1960s, 20th Century, Ambiguous Relationships, Attraction, Backstory, Character Study, Cold War, Espionage, Europe, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Fashion & Couture, Food, Foreign Language, Gen, Missions, Post-Canon, Soviet Union, Spies & Secret Agents, THRUSH, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-02
Updated: 2017-09-02
Packaged: 2018-12-17 09:56:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11849175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chantefable/pseuds/chantefable
Summary: The UNCLE unit consisting of Solo, Kuryakin and Teller is part of the current mission in Lisbon to acquire sensitive THRUSH communications.Solo's assignment leaves him too much time to think and feel. Gaby doesn't seem to have that problem.





	Entangled

**Author's Note:**

  * For [red_b_rackham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/red_b_rackham/gifts).



> Reference:
> 
> A Brief History of the Spy: Modern Spying from the Cold War to the War on Terror, by Paul Simpson
> 
> Everything in this story is wildly fictional; some historical context added so that it reads a bit less like Harlequin and more like John LeCarré.

  
“In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth.”  
Baruch Spinoza

“In love, the one who runs away is the winner.”  
Henri Matisse

***

  
The headquarters of the new United Network Command for Law and Enforcement were temporarily stationed at Copenhagen. There had been some talk about relocating to Geneva, but apparently people at Waverly's level were against having the flagship of what was heralded as a _progressive international intelligence and security agency_ in a country where women were not even allowed to vote. Given that women comprised 67 % of UNCLE personnel, with particularly large numbers in administration, accounting, computer science, and tactical planning divisions, it was uncharacteristic foresight and prudence on behalf of top executive officers.

(There was some talk that the main THRUSH base was actually in Geneva, and UNCLE simply feared infiltration. A pity. Solo enjoyed the sights. At least Copenhagen also had the tramway network. That was convenient.)

Operatives of Solo's caliber, however, rarely found themselves dawdling in Copenhagen long enough to appreciate the modern housing and green zones courtesy of the Finger Plan, gawk at Tivoli Gardens, or enjoy the municipal sports facilities. Denmark was a pit-stop, a few days here and there with debriefing and after-action reports; at best, a couple weeks while the handlers were putting the finishing touches to mission plans. To the astonishment of exactly no one, their team ('the Italians', as they were nicknamed because of the Vinciguerra affair, something that amused Saunders immensely) was for deployment, not for thinking. No good ever came from leaving Solo with enough time to think, Saunders had always said.

Perhaps someone ought to have paid more attention to Saunders' notes in the margins of Solo's file, because Lisbon left far more room for idleness and undue speculation than he was used to. There was just so much _time_ , thick like molasses. Solo meticulously established his cover, going over the shops with a fine comb and showering his young wife with presents. 

_Queria ver os sapatos de salto fino._

_Tem vestidos de sêda?_

_Você tem isto em vermelho?_

Kuryakin was not with him this time, their objectives running parallel, never intersecting. Kuryakin's cover was ironclad, a trade representative of the USSR; he actually had things to do with his time, liaising and brokering for Soviet cargo ships, and was delightfully, satisfyingly busy. And so there was no bickering, no arguments over Paco Rabanne. No opportunity arose to ask him more about his thorough knowledge of women's fashions, cut and line, fabric and color. Had he been part of the KGB security detail during the Dior show in 1959? Had he been embedded to supervise the likes of Regina Zbarskaya abroad? Or was his mother a top manager overseeing the supply chain for the GUM? The CIA dossier was infuriatingly vague in this regard, but if there was one thing Solo was sure of, it was that an implicated wife of someone executed for treason in wartime should have been sentenced to years in ALZhIR with full property confiscation. It was somewhat improbable that she apparently lived in Moscow – and not in a communal apartment at that! - and that Kuryakin's career in the KGB was unhindered by his family circumstances. Had Solo been in charge of analyzing his dossier in the beginning, before Berlin, he would have raised some valid questions about _why_ the man was not, say, a truck driver in Kazakhstan, but an operative allowed to participate in missions beyond the Iron Curtain. But no one had asked him, and Solo had already learned the hard way not to volunteer information. To say that Saunders had reveled during the Red Scare would have been a severe understatement, and Solo routinely refused to attract attention to himself with unsolicited insights. McCarthyism had taught everyone that appearing too knowledgeable about the enemy was quite likely to land you under suspicion. 

Kuryakin remained a mystery, the reason for his penchant for avant-garde hemlines undisclosed.

Solo was fully aware that he had too much free time on his hands if this was what he pondered on his walk back to the hotel, hands full of boxes of _papos de anjo_ for his 'delightful young wife'. Gaby ate them all on principle, abhorring waste, and then complained that the dresses fit no longer, so to the shops he went again. _Preciso fazer umas compras._ A vicious circle.

With Gaby, he could talk; the nights were warm and mellow, and they stayed together at the suite or going out, a businessman and his wife. Attempts at conversation fell flat, however, their interests vastly different. Out of habit, he tried to lure her in, pry a little, get an angle on her current motivation and much maligned special relationship with Alexander Waverly, but his sugar-coated interrogation was half-hearted at best. She felt it; as the poet had said, 'Too open nets even simple birds do shun'.

Indeed, if there was anything he could establish about his mission partner with any degree of confidence, it was that the chop-shop girl from East Berlin had picked the English small talk technique surprisingly fast. The talk of the weather gave him toothache; the only personal details Gaby had ceded were that she had only went to see Christiansborg Palace once and that she liked _Shalimar_. Both were useless bits of information Solo could have deduced for himself.

More things could be observed, inferred, extrapolated from the evidence presented by scattered toiletries, unfinished cups of coffee, gaping silk bathrobes; from the outlines of her lithe, boyish figure limned by moonlight on the balcony and the prominent, swollen joints of her toes he studied as he massaged her feet in the evenings. (He had asked for permission to discomfit her, and she had granted permission to discomfit him. They were at an impasse, as usual.) 

The joints, the muscles, the build: a combination of early training at the ballet school and long hours at her uncle's chop-shop. Some minor burns along the forearms, probably a car-related accident. Sabotage or assault at the ballet school, less likely but also possible. Ballet was vicious, or so Solo had been assured once by a gregarious companion in his bed. 

A love of heavy perfume, bright nail polish reeking of formaldehyde resin, colorful plastic bangles and baubles Solo was confident had to be toxic (or he wouldn't have been ordered to carry out some sabotage operations to make sure their production plants were located in some areas and not others once upon a time). 

A passion for all things in yellow gold, no matter how gaudy (glittering hand bags and gold-lamé, sequins and jewelry). _Tem uma pulseira de ouro branco?_ Solo's stealthy endeavors to bring some more sophistication to her look were less successful than he would have liked.

He watched her a lot, the enraptured stares expected and appropriate for a doting husband at the dinner table. The meals were long, _carne de vinho d'alhos_ and _ervilhas guisadas á portuguesa_ , and he had _time_... God, so much time. 

Why hadn't this time been his when he had gone AWOL to smuggle a kitschy Greuze for a generous collector? When he had done a poor job of procuring forged documents that had led to his arrest in the wake of Hillenkoetter's departure? When he had been in a redacted location in South America to topple a redacted government for redacted reasons, and caught a stray bullet in his thigh, an odd twinge in his quadriceps still making itself known six years later? 

Now, as if compensating for the past deficit, Solo had lots of precious time at his disposal – to calculate the adjustments, to configure the time-table, to plan the dead drops of secured information for other UNCLE agents, and to follow the micro expressions on Gaby's face as she chewed, to speculate about what she liked and what she wanted. To speculate what she discreetly reported to Waverly about his and Kuryakin's progress, bypassing the usual channel, because she had been their _de facto_ supervisor since Istanbul. She was, for lack of a better designation, what passed for additional counter-intelligence officer within their intelligence team; what Kuryakin called a _seksot_ , 'secret employee'. With sweet, bountiful time at dinner, Solo could easily, in addition to his mission duties and cover maintenance, estimate what exactly Gaby could be planning to add to her report on him in that very moment. And he could do all that before dessert; as they ate _arroz doce_ , he had nothing better to do than to think about the column of Gaby's throat, the pursing of her full lips, the sure grip of her fingers on the dessert spoon. He was old enough to feel like a leering old man.

He wished there was less time, that he had more to do. Such considerations were useless. They could have been a marvelous addition to Saunders' dossier on Gabriela Teller, citizenship currently unknown, affiliation with MI-5 or MI-6 currently unknown, assigned to UNCLE, time frame unspecified. They could have been, but Solo was not going to provide them. He had not received instructions to provide information on Teller to the CIA, and he was sticking to his parameters rigidly. The analysis was entirely for his own benefit, just like with Kuryakin: a way to understand the fellow operative better, to make accurate predictions in the field.

And so, on slow nights – and all their Lisbon nights were slow – Solo was thinking about the faded scars on Gaby's hands and the pout of her lip as she pored over transcripts like she would have over car engine specifications purely for his own sake. 

Gaby's Portuguese had been non-existent, but she was picking it up quickly, a progress possibly accelerated by the rudimentary French she had learned over the past year. Solo could clearly see Waverly's influence, tacit endorsement of the virtues of classical education, some Greek, some Latin, some French… not that Gaby could tell Caligula or Seneca apart. Or so she claimed. Solo was fully aware that she could have been conning him, or conning all of them all along. Who was to say she wasn't actually a deep cover Stasi officer with a degree in Ancient History? The thought carried some twisted appeal, particularly when Solo found himself smoking on their balcony at one a.m.. They were all dissembling, and Gaby had proven her effortless artifice early in their acquaintance, faking loyalties and changing masks with admirable ease. Truly, it is the excellence of the acting that matters…

Solo's nights were long because, Gaby's nascent Portuguese proficiency notwithstanding, he was the one who could actually listen to the records and understand well enough to do some preliminary processing for the analysts. Of course, his French was much better. Not that Saunders would have put it in his file; fewer skills listed, fewer questions asked. Solo was assured that Oleg Volkov had had the same reasons for obfuscating Kuryakin's passable French, and so he had the courtesy of not mentioning it, ever. It wasn't like Kuryakin had given himself away somehow; Solo had just happened to converse with a third party, in the UNCLE canteen at Copenhagen no less, who had let it slip that she had recalled the Russian from Vinogradov's security detail in Paris. Definitely not something to be found in Kuryakin's official dossier; possibly an argument in favor of being a watchdog for the likes of Zbarskaya? Speculation, fruitless speculation. Sifting through chatter on the records required too little mental effort, and Solo's brain latched onto foolish things.

His thoughts went round in circles, Berlin-Rome-Istanbul, swirls of fat milk in his coffee, a round mark left by a bullet in his thigh, a round imprint left on the transcript page by condensation on Gaby's glass. Them circling around each other, pacing the room, pointless conversations about the weather; Kuryakin in a separate orbit entirely. The circles on the Pierre Cardin dress he had bought for Gaby the day before, very Space Age.

The current mission was clearly inspired by Operations Gold and Silver, and Solo had to wonder why it wasn't called Bronze, if only for the symmetry. Perhaps it was too tawdry; Waverly would have been concerned with it being in poor taste, and possibly an affront to their Soviet colleague. Gaby's eye-roll had suggested as much when he had mentioned it in the beginning. Or maybe it was simply a matter going for a fresh start and avoiding associations with the MI-6 projects. Either way, the Lisbon affair was codenamed Operation Kahve. Maybe it was meaningless, maybe Waverly wanted a repeat of their success in Turkey, maybe someone at the planning office had been dying for a good cup of coffee to get through a dreary Danish morning.

Gaby enjoyed _queijadas de evora_ with her coffee these days. There was a hint of softness around her belly, around her face: one that couldn't have been there back when she had been an adolescent in ballet school, hadn't been there a few weeks earlier. 

Hadn't been there the day Solo had brought her over the Wall, learning the shape of her waist under his fingers for the first time. 

He had slept with her that first night, because Saunders had said that he had until morning to convince her and Solo had panicked. He ought to have been suspicious about how easy it had been to take Gaby to bed. She had said unkind things about his risotto and told him nothing but lies. That night he hadn't been trying to impress her, wary of overwhelming a young, inexperienced woman after a day of unfamiliar excitement and her first real brush with danger; in short, he had been completely blind to reality. No wonder she had switched her focus almost immediately, intent on getting Kuryakin to heel with blunt honey-pot tactics. 

Solo wondered about that night occasionally. He knew why he had slept with her, and why she had slept with him. He remembered her lean and hungry look, the casual manner he had chalked up to the ways of modern girls, those Jean Shrimpton lookalikes; he had recklessly dismissed the alarm bells going off in his head. She had _seemed_ to be merely following his lead, going along with the flow to mask her true motives. Still waters run deep and all that.

Solo did not resent her in the slightest; her behavior had been reasonable, professional, even. A partner's capability for dissemblance can be a guarantee of one's own survival in the field, and Solo was glad to have had proof of Gaby's talents first hand. Whatever had really happened between her and Kuryakin, Solo was sure that the Russian thought the same. The two of them were friendly; they were all friendly. 'The Italians' were a famously functional team with a high success rate.

Perhaps it was the disconnection that was driving Solo crazy then: Kuryakin being apart from them and all this liquid, sloshing time spent intercepting signals and pretending he was just a silly middle-aged American doting on his lovely young wife. 

Solo would have rather dug another tunnel, or perhaps chewed through cables with his teeth. 

Strategic matters were above his pay-grade. Were the records of any use? Was the THRUSH cell communicating anything that counted as proper intelligence? Was it actually Berlin and Operation Gold all over again, recycling the tried and true Soviet scheme, and THRUSH was already aware of the access to their cables Solo had managed to secure from the tiny pension-hotel where his alias was ensconced on a honeymoon with his wife? Were they simply feeding them disinformation, breadcrumbs leading somewhere – somewhere dangerous where THRUSH needed them to be, as part of their grand plan of waging economic and political warfare against the legitimate governments of the world?

It was possible, probable, but it was not Solo's job to verify whether it was the truth.

His job was eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, strolling in the city and bedecking Gaby in jewelry like a Christmas tree.

_Tem o mesmo anel com um diamante?_

He didn't even have the excuse of fitting the ring with a tracker. Leaving the jeweler's shop, Solo mentally berated his sentimentality. Of course, caring made them successful, a reliable unit, but caring like this was also something that usually got agents killed. Perhaps it had been inevitable: they were no longer strangers and could no longer cling to indifference. The price for vanished enmity was vulnerability. How very Kierkegaard. (God, Denmark had really managed to rub off on him if this was the rabbit hole of philosophizing he had fallen into!)

Solo took the tram to the hotel and did his best not to let on that he had noticed he was being followed. Given the situation, his distracted obliviousness was terribly convincing.

He had given Gaby the ring in public: the display was a nice contribution to their cover. Perversely, their cover was Solo's cover at the moment – a cover for his terrible lapse of good judgment and utterly misplaced, unsolicited infatuation. 

He wondered whether it would go away away if they slept together again.

He wondered whether Gaby would lose all respect for him if she knew he had somehow developed inopportune feelings for her, and wasn't simply offering because it was convenient and easy. 

(He wished he had less time to wonder. An intervention from THRUSH would have been almost welcome.)

Gaby had shrieked at the sight of the ring, gushing with the ebullient joy of a spoilt young thing, and there was a flicker of genuine greed and pleasure in her eyes. As usual, she was enjoying the moment, an opportunity to amuse herself with shiny and expensive playthings; as usual, he was drinking up her enjoyment, thankful for the pretense of their 'marriage'.

'Sin that is hidden is half forgiven.'

There had been Solo's tail from the jeweler's – a sign that they might be under increased surveillance – so Solo kissed Gaby in front of the open window that night, slipping his gun-callused fingers under the hem of her silk chemise and touching the tender skin. 

She told him to leave the lights on, because she was nothing if not practical and surveillance was a nuisance. He didn't let on that his thigh ached from hoisting and holding her up, and let himself pretend that her good mood wasn't because of the new Givenchy coat and the diamond set in yellow gold. It wasn't particularly good sex, but it was in plain sight, and _that_ was mission critical. Not Solo's ill-timed romantic fancies.

A sensible man would have cut his losses and run away, but Solo didn't have the luxury of leaving: splitting 'the Italians' would damage his standing at UNCLE, which would probably land him at Saunders' kennel again. Entangling ground; if Solo left there was hardly a chance he would ever get as far away from the pressure. He'd rather have this.

He might get over it. There was time.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Trivia:**  
>  Geneva: capital of Switzerland; Swiss women gained the right to vote in federal elections after a referendum in February 1971.  
> Finger Plan: Copenhagen urban development project introduced in 1947, with five 'fingers' stretching from city center along S-train routes.  
> Tivoli Gardens: famous pleasure garden and amusement park in Copenhagen, opened in 1843.  
> Christian Dior: French fashion designer, author of the 'New Look'; in 1959, held an official fashion show in Moscow.  
> Regina Zbarskaya: legendary Soviet mannequin of the 1960s, one of the first and most famous 'catwalk supermodels' demonstrating fashions in the USSR and abroad.  
> GUM: Glávnyj Universáĺnyj Magazín, lit. 'Main Universal Store' (prior to 1920s, 'Upper Trading Rows'), one of the few Soviet stores that did not have shortages of consumer goods. Party officials, celebrities or diplomats were assigned different categories of special access to goods not available to the average public.  
> ALZhIR: Labour Camp for Wives of Traitors of the Motherland at Akmolinsk in Kazakhstan.  
> Iron Curtain: expression dating back to Winston Churchill's 1946 address at Westminster College, Missouri: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.”  
> Red Scare: promotion of fear of a potential rise of communism or radical leftism as used by anti-leftist proponents; McCarthyism – the Second Red Scare (1947-1957).  
> Christiansborg Palace: the seat of Danish Parliament on the islet of Slotsholmen in central Copenhagen.  
> Shalimar: a perfume by Guerlain.  
> Jean-Baptiste Greuze: French Sentimentalist painter from the 18th century.  
> Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter: Director of the CIA, in 1950, replaced by General Walter Bedell Smith. This means that in the timeline of this story, Solo's criminal career ended and his time with the intelligence began in the early 1950s, a full decade prior to the movie events, making him a rather seasoned agent.  
> South America, etc.: reference to the CIA's operation 'Success' in Guatemala to organize a coup replacing the second legally elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, tolerant of locally known Communists, with Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas.  
> Dead drop: in espionage tradecraft, exchange of information or items without individuals meeting in person.  
> Seksot (Russian _сексот_ , lit. секретный сотрудник, secret employee): a term dating back to the secret service of the Russian Empire, also used in Soviet law enforcement and intelligence agencies to refer to an informant or a source of operative information.  
> Caligula: Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, Roman emperor, ruled in AD 37–41.  
> Seneca (the Younger): Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Stoic philosopher, circa 4 BC–AD 65.  
> Sergei Aleksandrovitch Vinogradov: Soviet diplomat, USSR's ambassador to France in 1953-1965.  
> Pierre Cardin: Italian-born French avant-garde designer, advancing geometric shapes and unisex fashion.  
> Operation Silver: Vienna-based MI-6 operation tapping Soviet landlines to monitor phone calls and teletype traffic.  
> Operation Gold: Berlin-based counterpart of the above; discovered by the Soviets and much publicized. The Soviets were aware of the Berlin tapping all along because of the KGB spy in MI-6, George Blake, but allowed it to happen to protect his position.  
> Jean Shrimpton: English model, one of the world's first supermodels.
> 
>  **Language:**  
>  Portuguese:  
>  _Queria ver os sapatos de salto fino._ – I'd like to see some high heels.  
>  _Tem vestidos de sêda?_ – Do you have any silk dresses?  
>  _Você tem isto em vermelho?_ – Do you have this item in red?  
>  _Preciso fazer umas compras._ – I need to make a few purchases.  
>  _Tem uma pulseira de ouro branco?_ – Do you have a watch in white gold?  
>  _papos de anjo_ – syrupy egg cakes  
>  _carne de vinho d'alhos_ – pork sautéed in white wine and herbs  
>  _ervilhas guisadas á portuguesa_ – Portuguese sautéed peas  
>  _queijadas de evora_ – cheese cakes  
>  _Tem o mesmo anel com um diamante?_ – Do you have the same ring with a diamond?  
> Turkish:  
>  _kahve_ – coffee
> 
>  **Quotes:**  
>  “Too open nets even simple birds do shun.” Ovid  
> “Life's like a play: it's not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.” Seneca  
> “Still waters run deep.” a Latin proverb  
> “Yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look. / He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.” William Shakespeare, _Julius Caesar_  
>  “At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.” Søren Kierkegaard  
> “Sin that is hidden is half forgiven.” Giovanni Boccaccio  
> “Ground which can be abandoned but is hard to re-occupy is called entangling.” Sun Tzu


End file.
